The Forester family of Oklahoma packed up and moved to California in 1936 to flee the Dust Bowl. Louise, front row, left, in cap, and Shirley, second row, second from right, tell their family's story in Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl," debuting Sunday on KACV.

A farm sits abandoned north of Dalhart in 1938.

After months of buildup, a documentary exploring the worst time in this area’s history makes its debut Sunday.

Inspired in part by Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” Burns’ documentary revisits the ecological nightmare through archival footage, family photographs and insightful interviews with survivors from throughout the area.

“We always had hope,” Wayne Lewis of Beaver County, Okla., says in Sunday’s premiere. “Next year was going to be better, and even this year was going to be better.”

But the farmers would learn that the overplowing of their wheat fields, instead of paving the way to economic boom times, would turn into a disaster of biblical proportions.

“We learned slowly,” Lewis said. “What didn’t work, you tried it harder the next time. You didn’t try something different, you just tried it harder — the same thing that didn’t work.”

Egan and other historians offer context throughout the documentary.

“We created a world-class environmental disaster in a matter of 40 or 50 years,” said Donald Worster, an environmental historian from the University of Kansas.

Burns said he was drawn, as always, by “a good story.”

“You just want to be able to tell human stories,” Burns told the Amarillo Globe-News in April. “Sometimes, it’s Abraham Lincoln agonizing about how to prosecute the war. Sometimes, it’s the story of Jackie Robinson trying to make it in the major leagues.

“In this case, it was all these folks out in ‘No Man’s Land’ in the Dust Bowl, trying to make a go of it.”

Burns and his production crew appealed to PBS viewers in the area to tell their stories, garnering “a tremendous response.”

Eventually, he and his producers conducted interviews with 26 survivors of the 1930s environmental disaster, including residents of Amarillo, Guymon, Okla., and more.

“They all had an amazing contribution to make,” Burns said. “Editing is editing, and stuff hits the cutting-room floor, but everybody’s story is an important one.”

The documentary brings the disaster to vivid life through those interviews and archival photos and newsreel footage.

“When one of these dusters would approach from afar ... it was like a mountain range, (because) in some cases, the storms were 100 miles, 150 miles, 300 miles wide and a mile or more high,” Egan says in the first night of the documentary. “So imagine driving on a flat land and looking off and seeing a mountain range itself start to move.

“Daylight itself would be obliterated,” Egan continues. “Somebody told me it was like ‘two midnights in a jug.’”

Burns said he thinks the film “is a story about Mother Nature, but it’s also about human nature, good and bad.

“Remember, this is a man-made ecological disaster, not just a bad time that happened to the area,” he said. “Humans do stupid things, and humans do heroic things, and if you ignore either one of those things, you do it at your peril.”

“I am so excited for the people of this region to be able to see the film,” said Linda Pitner, KACV general manager. “I think they’re going to be so pleased to see the story.

“It is a hard story to watch ... but it nevertheless is a very important story, and it’s an opportunity to see a story that is centered in this region and impacted the entire nation.”

The broadcast is the culmination of months of related activities leading up to the premiere.

KACV’s “Days of Dust” activities have included several locally produced specials; presentations by Egan, whose book was the fall selection for Amarillo Reads; photography exhibitions at Amarillo Museum of Art and Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum; and more.

The documentary will be released Tuesday on DVD and Blu-ray with deleted scenes, additional interviews and behind-the-scenes features.

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